Virally shared “nuggets of cultural currency” such as these are examples of “memetics”, an important mechanism of meaning that pre-dates the internet but is now central to the the internet’s rising creative comment culture.

LOLcats pre-dated the Internet. The left image was taken by Harry Whittier Frees in 1905. The right is ‘Happy Cat’, the first LOLcat, from 2007.Wikipedia / Something Awful / Author

Wow history

Early in the 1920s, the biologist Richard Semon used the term “mnemes” in theorising biologically inheritable memory.

Indexicality. An element in one meme can be used to comment on many situations. “Exploitable” memes such as Disaster Girl can be overlaid on to any picture of a disaster.Disaster Girl exploitable; Original exploit; Disaster Girl at the London riots.Know Your Meme / Author

A meme may be created by an individual or an institution deliberately (many marketing companies now strive to create viral content) or, as often as not, an accidental image, turn-of-phrase or concept will be exploited by a savvy netizen (as was the case for Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” gaffe).

So internet

Genes rely on their hosts for transmission, and memes are no exception: in creating the internet it turns out that we have developed the ultimate meme hothouse.

In danah boyd‘s terms, the internet is a “networked public” that has four features highly conducive to making and spreading memes:

Replicability. Digital objects are infinitely reproducible and exploitable across a range of platforms.

Searchability. Finished versions of memes as well as raw materials and templates are easily found.

Scalability. Digital objects are created for a particular audience but with the knowledge that they can spread to an unknowably large audience wherever the internet is available.

Persistence. Although individual digital objects may not last as long as analogue objects, they are infinitely transferable and storable in many locations.

You’re doing it wrong.funnyjunk

Variations on a theme is the name of the game with memes, as attested to by the huge number of memes posted every day at user-generated content sites such as 4chan and Reddit, and categorised at sites such as the Cheezburger Network.

Engines providing both the raw materials and editing capabilities to rapidly produce new instances of common memes have even been developed at sites such as memegenerator.net and imgur and Cheezburger’s Rage Comic LOLBuilder, so that even the technically-challenged can use a meme to express something – as long as they understand the template.

User-generated content is the key concept here because memes are indicative of a change from last century’s passive read-only culture to an active read-write or produsage-oriented culture, in which very few resources are needed to broadcast a message to the entire world–as Cory Bernardi has discovered.

Petty as they may seem, then, memes have value and we must protect them as a form of expression when governments and corporations attempt to chill fair use of “copyright” materials via treaties such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Anti-TPP image that Wikileaks used to publicise its leak of the secretly-negotiated IP chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.Google Images